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Free Resources

Make the Most of Your Ketso

This page is a guide to our free, open-source resources, including workshop plans, videos about how to plan a workshop and hints and tips on effective engagement.

Ketso has been designed to lead you through running a good workshop. Each piece of the hands-on kit acts as a prompt for effective engagement. But Ketso does not run the workshop for you!

We have developed together a range of free resources to help you plan and run effective workshops and meetings with Ketso. This page guides you through these resources.

Top hints are noted with this icon.

If you are new to facilitation, these resources will introduce you to some key ideas for planning and running workshops, and demonstrate ways to use Ketso effectively.

If you are an experienced facilitator, these resources will quickly get you up to speed with how Ketso can extend your capabilities.

If you are already using Ketso, these resources will give you ideas about different ways to use the kit, we are constantly adding new ideas for workshops and updating resources to help you make the most of your Ketso.

Click here for info on resources in different languages (so far only Spanish).

How Ketso works

A Ketso kit can be seen as a bit of hardware that lets you run different applications, or ways of running workshops. We call this the 'thinkingware' of the workshop. If you are not familiar with Ketso, we recommend you have a look at this visual walk-through of how it works here.

Each kit comes with a hard copy of the Ketso User Guide (also available to download), which has more detail.

We have created a series of brief videos that lead you through the process of planning and running a workshop, so you can see the nuts and bolts of how Ketso works in action. One of these videos features a salad spinner, and shows how to capture the results and clean the kit ready for re-use.

It takes roughly half an hour to watch the basic how-to videos – giving a great grounding in how to use Ketso.

We strongly recommend that you run a practice workshop with Ketso before you use it in a pressurised situation! Here we have some ideas for getting started with Ketso.

Principles of engaging workshops: These PowerPoint slides show essential principles for engaging workshops, such as 'start with the positive', and how Ketso helps you to meet them.

Principles of effective stakeholder engagement: These PowerPoint slides show key principles for stakeholder engagement, which have emerged from the last 20 years of experience in developing Ketso and running workshops with thousands of people in a wide range of sectors and countries. Feel free to use these in training or teaching, but please do reference Dr. Joanne Tippett and www.ketso.com.

Planning a workshop

The number one hint is that you do need to plan for your workshop!

No matter how easy Ketso is to use, you still need to have an idea of what you are trying to get out of the workshop, how you will use each piece of the kit and how long it will take.

The basic structure of a Ketso workshop as well as sample workshop plans that can be adapted to your needs are available on this page. These workshop plans are examples of different ways to use the kit to help you structure a workshop. You can download these plans (Word documents), adapt them to your needs and learn from them for planning your own workshop.

If you think of improvements to these workshop plans, or develop new ‘apps’ for Ketso – we’d love to hear about them. Our aim is to create a growing library of open resources. Please get in touch to let us know what you have learned.

This page, 'How does Ketso work', shows how each piece of the toolkit acts as a prompt to think of key elements in a workshop. The pieces have been designed to enhance creative thinking and to encourage everyone to have an input in the process.

There are two key things to think of in terms of how you will be using Ketso, after you have decided the focus (as represented by the centrepiece) and the aims.

First, you need to think through what the different coloured leaves will represent (e.g. what questions you will be asking). For some ideas on the colours and how they can be used, see this FAQ.

Second, you need to think how (and if) you will use the branches to provide themes to add some structure the workshop. This FAQ has more information on how to find themes for a workshop.

We also have a useful set of PowerPoint slides that go through the key ideas of how a Ketso workshop is structured.

You can go into more depth with this Ketso Workshop Planning Guide (Word document). Once you have learned the Ketso Workshop BASICS, you may find this simple template (Word document) for planning a workshop helpful.

Preparation and practicalities

We have developed a series of checklists (Word document) to help you in preparing for a workshop – these cover planning in advance of the workshop, such as thinking of what to bring and the practicalities at the venue, as well as a list of things to check and do upon arrival.

For example, it is important to make sure that you will have enough space and tables and chairs for people to be able to use Ketso at the venue!

You will also need to check for disabled access and how people will get there (remember to include a map in joining instructions!).

Remember to plan for how many felt workspaces you need – we recommend dividing the expected number by 6 to allow for extra people on the day (with a maximum of 8 people per Ketso workspace to be effective).

Running a workshop

Click here for our top tips on running a workshop with Ketso. These are ideas that we have found to really help facilitators run a smooth workshop.

This 6 minute video goes through the process of running a Ketso workshop, demonstrating how to introduce the stages and some of the key things we have learned from years of using Ketso.

You may also want to have a look at this FAQ on key messages to give participants when running a workshop. These help orientate participants to using the kit and help the workshop run smoothly.

Download this PowerPoint Slideshow that you can use to introduce Ketso and the process of using the kit. It has a few examples of how Ketso has been used, which helps in introducing the kit. You can adapt this to suit your workshop. There are also slideshows for many of the sample workshop plans, that you can adapt to suit your needs, ready to download on this page.

You can download an image of a Ketso felt which you can add your own workshop focus (centrepiece) and themes (branches) here:

Capturing the results and preparing the kit for re-use

Ketso washes clean in water! You can see how easy it is to clean the kit for re-use in this brief video.

You can take pictures of a Ketso after the workshop, taking a picture of each quadrant as well as an overview picture of the whole felt. You need a decent quality camera (8 mega pixels or more) and you need to check that the leaves have come out clear enough to read.

For writing-up the results after a workshop, we have spreadsheets and a simple word document you can download to fill in with the ideas from participants (what is written on the leaves). This allows you to sort the ideas from different felts and create simple graphs from the data.

I started out really sceptical, thinking what can these things in the bag really do in a workshop, but once the group I was facilitating got going, I was convinced. This really produced great results, and the group dynamics were great. People were really thinking things through and developing a sophisticated idea in a very short period of time... Ketso performed really well. Max Robinson Enterprise Education Director at Durham University